Valgoglio

Valgoglio stands at nine hundred and thirty metres in a side valley of the Val Seriana, and both village and valley take their name from the torrent: goi, in the Bergamo dialect, is a watercourse with gorges and deep ravines. Charlemagne gave these mountains to two great monasteries in 774, but the families of Bergamo came up all the same to work the mines; in 1026 the bishopric took the territory back in exchange for other lands, reserving to itself the proceeds of the extraction and working of silver and iron, and from there began a long quarrel between the power of the feudal lord and that of the bishop. Metal was the bread of the place: much of the weapons, the armour and the breastplates were made with iron dug here and forged in the workshops of Colarete, and the coins of the Bergamo mint were struck with silver from these valleys. There was gold too, documented from the fifteen hundreds, perhaps never in significant quantity.

On the first of November 1666 a landslide came down: it grazed the hamlet of Novazza and destroyed the workshops from Colarete to those on the Goglio at Gromo. In one night the economy of the valley changed, and the people had to go back to keeping animals. Not long ago, in a disused mine at Novazza, modest quantities of uranium were found, and there was a plan to open a mine to extract it; the people here, and those of the villages around, dissented so strongly that the project was withdrawn. In the old days they spoke gaì here, the ancient language used by the shepherds, now almost completely gone. Today the village lives on tourism, on hydroelectric industry and in some cases on shepherding, and many go down towards Bergamo for work. Above the houses there is a route they call the round of the five lakes.